Highlights

Procedural levels: a pleasing blend of hand-crafted locales and randomization.

Fight robots! Tear giant ones limb from limb, pounce on small ones, and try not to die.

Sell Me The Idea In One Sentence

If I have to convince you why being any form of dromaeosaurid is freaking awesome, then I’m not sure we can be friends.

This game is carefully crafted to give you the closest possible feeling of being one of these glorious monsters — then turning you loose to do fun stuff. That means you don’t get (or need) “frickin lasers,” health upgrades, or character progression.

That said, as we know from historical documents, it’s hard to be a raptor in a futuristic dystopia. Robots have guns, and you don’t. Despite the fact that you’re an incredible hunting machine, you’ve got your work cut out for you if you want to master the game.

What’s The Point?

For the pure fun of the thing. In 1993, a certain game let you be a raptor. The controls were iffy. The levels were short and static. It’s very dated. Yet many of us still dust it off periodically — just to be a raptor. Release Raptor gives you a far more satisfying, modern, dynamic experience.

For the challenge. Brutal Mode approximates what a real theropod might experience when attacked by robots. Aka, if you get shot by a rocket that’s the end. You’ll need to use all your raptor skills to tear your foes to shreds.

To play with kids. I want to be able to play this with my 5 year old son, but still have dismemberment (because that’s cool). How to do that without blood or gore? Robots! Little robots = pouncing targets; giant mechs = dismemberment targets.

For a power trip. Brutal Mode is only fun for some. So we have Power Trip Mode, where you’re on an invincible rampage. It’s not about IF you can do it, but how WELL you do it. Speedrunning is encouraged. Your performance is scored and rated (avoiding hits, etc), so mistakes still have consequences.

For daily runs — maybe. My hope is to build out some daily leaderboards for both play modes, but no promises on that yet.

For the strategy of it — probably. The idea is to make these branching mazes kind of like AI War: Fleet Command maps in terms of how they provide you with opportunities. Each opportunity may increase the heat you take while moving forward, but at the same time net you some good things (thematic secondary goals like blowing up part of the facility, etc). I think I have figured out how to avoid excessive backtracking or frustration with this, but I don’t want to state that as a definite feature until I have it prototyped in.